The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) confirmed yesterday that in addition to land owned by the Formosa Petrochemical Plant in Renwu (仁武), Kaohsiung County, 28 out of 50 former factory sites it tested recently around the nation were found to be contaminated.
Tsai Hung-teh (蔡鴻德), executive secretary of the EPA’s soil and groundwater remediation fund management board, said it selected 50 factories last year that had ceased operations, including former steel, electroplating, leather, wood processing and electronics plants.
The administration confirmed that 28 of them were polluted, with either the soil or underground water contaminated by heavy metals and petroleum hydrocarbons.
Some of the listed companies are publicly traded firms.
Tsai said nine of the sites were located in Taoyuan County, Taipei County, Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County. The remaining sites were in Tainan County, Taipei City, Taichung County, Tainan County, Tainan City and Pingtung County.
Tsai said that the administration had turned the list of factories over to local governments, asking them to monitor the pollution and take necessary measures to prevent it spreading.
Concern about land pollution increased after a story in the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) on Sunday that detailed how the EPA inspected the soil and the underground water at Formosa Petrochemical Plant in Renwu (仁武) last year and found both to contain chemical compounds at levels that exceeded EPA standards.
The EPA results showed that levels of 1,2-dichloroethane, believed to be a carcinogen, were 30,000 times higher than the government standard.
Tsai said that the EPA investigation confirmed the Renwu site was contaminated.
“We sampled underground water at locations near the chemical storage tanks and the waste water management facilities and found that pollutants were absorbed undiluted into the soil,” Tsai said.
Tsai said that Formosa did try to reinforce the structure of the wastewater pit in 2006 though that work was not completed. It reported the pit was built in the 1970s and it had discovered cracks.
While Formosa claimed that land pollution was confined to the Renwu site, Tsai said that the EPA would carry out an investigation to determine if this was true.
“Based on Article 15 of the Soil and Groundwater Pollution Remediation Act (土污法), the administration can order a company to completely or partially stop operations only if the company fails to mitigate the damage or halt the spread of pollutants,” Tsai said, adding that the company has yet to do this.
Kaohsiung County Government has the right to file lawsuits against Formosa if it deems the company to have endangered public safety.
The inspection equipment and data transmission system for new robotic dogs that Taipei is planning to use for sidewalk patrols were developed by a Taiwanese company, the city’s New Construction Office said today, dismissing concerns that the China-made robots could pose a security risk. The city is bringing in smart robotic dogs to help with sidewalk inspections, Taipei Deputy Mayor Lee Ssu-chuan (李四川) said on Facebook. Equipped with a panoramic surveillance system, the robots would be able to automatically flag problems and easily navigate narrow sidewalks, making inspections faster and more accurate, Lee said. By collecting more accurate data, they would help Taipei
STATS: Taiwan’s average life expectancy of 80.77 years was lower than that of Japan, Singapore and South Korea, but higher than in China, Malaysia and Indonesia Taiwan’s average life expectancy last year increased to 80.77 years, but was still not back to its pre-COVID-19 pandemic peak of 81.32 years in 2020, the Ministry of the Interior said yesterday. The average life expectancy last year increased the 0.54 years from 2023, the ministry said in a statement. For men and women, the average life expectancy last year was 77.42 years and 84.30 years respectively, up 0.48 years and 0.56 years from the previous year. Taiwan’s average life expectancy peaked at 81.32 years in 2020, as the nation was relatively unaffected by the pandemic that year. The metric
TAKING STOCK: The USMC is rebuilding a once-abandoned airfield in Palau to support large-scale ground operations as China’s missile range grows, Naval News reported The US Marine Corps (USMC) is considering new sites for stockpiling equipment in the West Pacific to harden military supply chains and enhance mobility across the Indo-Pacific region, US-based Naval News reported on Saturday. The proposed sites in Palau — one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — and Australia would enable a “rapid standup of stored equipment within a year” of the program’s approval, the report said, citing documents published by the USMC last month. In Palau, the service is rebuilding a formerly abandoned World War II-era airfield and establishing ancillary structures to support large-scale ground operations “as China’s missile range and magazine
A 72-year-old man in Kaohsiung was sentenced to 40 days in jail after he was found having sex with a 67-year-old woman under a slide in a public park on Sunday afternoon. At 3pm on Sunday, a mother surnamed Liang (梁) was with her child at a neighborhood park when they found the man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and woman, surnamed Huang (黃), underneath the slide. Liang took her child away from the scene, took photographs of the two and called the police, who arrived and arrested the couple. During questioning, Tsai told police that he had met Huang that day and offered to
RSS